Tag: culture war

I first entered into some vague sense of political consciousness, like many in my generation, as a teenager during high school, and I started out with a heady mixture of idealism and confusion without any theoretical or ideological ground upon which to base my political assumptions, goals and ideals beyond a consistent passion for the idea of freedom. In my early years, I would oscillate frequently between an undefined anarchism and an equally vague left-liberalism, though many times I would often fall on the side of anarchism. Before that though you would probably find me supporting political candidates like Barack Obama or Nick Clegg in my early teenage years because I didn’t like the opposition or I suppose I was something of a basic liberal at the time. In the case of the anarchistic tendencies and passions, there was no real detail or ideology behind it, although I think I can say with some certainty that I was never an “anarcho-capitalist” (which I put in quotes because anarcho-capitalism even as a moniker is as much of a joke as the actual ideology appears to be). Literally, my primary reasoning was simply that the state was a bad thing, an infringement upon human liberty at its core, and alongside that I saw what I vaguely recognized as the right wing of politics, the conservative wing, as interested in the suppression of culture and the harvesting of the planet through hegemony and warfare. Back then I also used to be somewhat into the Zeitgeist films for a while, though I disagreed with what I perceived as their collectivism as well as their raging case of technophilia and utopianism, and I admired people like Bill Hicks, George Carlin and even Michael Moore, and I also had a fascination with people like Timothy Leary who were essentially free-thinking hippies for lack of a better word. So I guess you could say that I was pretty left wing at the time. This also coincided with the seeds of my interest in spirituality and to some extent the occult, as I discovered via the Internet the writings of people like Vadge Moore, Robin Artisson, and Osho.

By the time I entered college, I aligned less with anarchism or left-liberalism and drew closer to what I would call a sort of libertarian-lite sort of philosophy. Like with my anarchist phase, there was no ideological or theoretical base or praxis that I worked with, and it was still not clear if I was into left-wing libertarian ideologies or right-wing libertarian ideologies, in fact often times I would hold positions from both sides of the aisle – from the American right, for example, you’d find me with a notably strong support for gun ownership, particularly in contrast to pretty much everyone else in my college class, while on the left you’d largely find me supporting fairly socially liberal and sometimes even progressive causes. Keep that in mind, because for a long time going forward, until very recently, I had a certain personal distrust of socialism and related ideologies. It was around this time, or perhaps somewhere before that, that I became a Satanist as well. The emergent egoistic perspective, loosely borrowed from Anton LaVey and largely drawn from my obsession with the thematics of the Shin Megami Tensei series, lent itself rather nicely to the satanic libertarian phase of my life. Even after abandoning anarchism, I have often said on this blog that I would still held anarchy as an ideal of things, just non-attainable in reality. Why, I’m surprised that I never read the writings of Max Stirner at the time, because open introspection something tells me that the egoistic outlook probably lent itself at times to being something of a crypto-Stirnerite without me realizing it (although, in all fairness, it’s probably for the best that I didn’t outright embrace Stirnerite philosophy from what I’ve heard). Instead I thought of myself more in line with LaVey, and I guess Ayn Rand by proxy to some extent given how influential she was to LaVey’s philosophical outlook, as well as the ancient Chinese egoist Yang Zhu, who I even devoted a short blog post to back in 2013. Anyways, this egoistic vaguely libertarian outlook remained fairly consistent, although as time drew on I became very cynical, even to the point where I would dismiss democracy as a failed system.

However, as you may know, a lot changed back in 2016. By this time I had been vaguely aware of concepts like political correctness, and I had started seeing all manner of ludicrously illiberal proposals put forward and laws enacted by my country’s government, but eventually I would start to become more and more aware of exactly what kind of hot mess liberal society was in. In the space of two months I went from a cynical individual who didn’t care about the Brexit referendum much other than “maybe the EU will stop the Tories from making anti-porn laws” to becoming a strong and convinced Eurosceptic after realizing that my rationale for this was complete nonsense (and after seeing David Cameron, one of my most hated of politicians and then Conservative Party leader, come out in support of remaining in the European Union). As I begun to see large sections of the “left” oppose this, and in general act as antithetical to the liberty of their political opponents, I shifted right over the course of the year and began to take interest in things like populism, nationalism and “classical liberalism” (I’ll explain why that’s in quotes later on). With regards to American politics, I eventually became one of the rare Satanists to lend his support to Donald Trump, having rejected Bernie Sanders, become fed up of the Libertarians, and utterly opposed to Hillary Clinton, and because initially it looked like he might actually. Of course, we now know how that worked out.

Being on the right hasn’t actually been that easy on me, and it’s more often than not been a source of conflict on my part. On the one hand, being a Satanist, I could justify sympathizing with the right through the sort of socially Darwinist perspective that you find in Satanism and that I stressed as separating Satanism from simply being humanism. On the other hand, the tendency towards traditionalism or just cultural conservatism makes them annoying from time to time, and trying to deal with some people who went on and on about Christian culture whilst being a Satanist who supported secularism has been frustrating. Even on economics I was never such an absolutist as many libertarian capitalists are. Looking back, I wonder how many people on the right managed to reconcile economic libertarianism with the desire for the nation state to maintain control of its borders considering that full on economic libertarian logic inevitably leads to the conclusion that borders violate the non-aggression principle (an argument that I oppose), as well as, as I will go on to mention, the fact that capitalism cannot stay nationally grassroots because it must transgress borders in order to sustain itself. And then there’s the alt-right, who I never supported but always had to deal with the fact that they were on the radical end on the right.

In addition to this, I had noticed quite a few dubious things. The first, and this is honestly where I get into repudiation territory here, when you look into it, what the right calls “Cultural Marxism” is largely a myth. It has nothing to do with Marxist economics, and the way they use it is simply a stand-in for what would otherwise be called postmodernism or simply liberal political correctness. The only reason I used the phrase at the time was because I didn’t know shit about Marxism at the time, and I wanted nothing to do with the left so I distanced myself from them too much to learn about it until recently. I will leave a video below from a channel named Comrade Pierre Tru-Dank which I think explains the myth quite well, and I highly recommend you check out his other content as well.

Of course what my man Pierre doesn’t mention is that the term “Cultural Marxism” originated by critics of the Frankfurt School, such as Trent Schroyer, before becoming distorted by people like Pat Buchanan and William Lind into the “Cultural Marxism” meme we know today so that they could wage culture war against socially progressive, hell even just plain liberal causes, under the guise of fighting communism after the fall of the Soviet Union. I don’t think I can say I was a total believer, in fact it was often when I saw it applied to religion that I often saw glimpses of the theory’s weaknesses (seriously, Christianity is not dying because of “Cultural Marxism”, it’s dying because it is an increasingly irrelevant religion, impotent before the dawn of consumerism and the death of Yahweh), but I was simply aware of the term being paraded by “classical liberals” and thought of it as just another way of referring to the particular ideology that we kept seeing from campus ideologues and their progressive apologists. I think it’s fair to say that many people who found themselves opposed to the modern, authoritarian culture warrior breed of the left ended up getting duped by this trope and its proponents, and sadly I think many of them will not realize the same thing as I did before they become further entrenched into the right than I was.

Another thing I began to realize is how many on the right will often lay claim to a principle, such as opposition to political correctness, and then violate it for tactical reasons, or sometimes out of pure idiocy and hypocrisy. We saw this with Laura Loomer and Jack Posobiec gatecrashing last year’s Shakespeare In The Park rendition of Julius Ceasar and having it shut down because they seemingly believed that the play was endorsing violence against the president, which anyone with two brain cells would have interpreted as utterly nonsensical. You can also see this with how many on the right will claim to hate Saul Alinsky and his tactics because of his communist political leanings, and condemn Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for allegedly using their tactics, only to cite the very same Alinskyite tactics as a rationale for condemning someone as having offended them, as was the case when a Twitter personality named psychicpebbles uploaded a caricature of Ajit Pai to express disapproval of the repeal of Obama-era net neutrality protections. Both of those things they will rationalize with some unprincipled tripe about how it is the only way to teach SJWs the errors of their tactics, when in reality all it does is showcase the idiocy of the people who play them and their willingness to violate the ideals they claim to stand for just to compete with, let’s face it, blindingly insane college liberals who have no real politics beyond the realm of outrage culture and a kind of selfish intersectionalist metaphysics. That leads us nicely into another thing: as time went on I noticed that the whole social justice thing had petered out and slowly become irrelevant, but the right on the other hand keeps wanting to milk the whole thing for what it’s worth, and all the while you’ve got plenty of right wing snowflakes out there. In fact, just this week I have noticed that a high school teacher in California was fired over a rant he made just shy of two months ago where he basically dissed the military, and not only that but the student who got him fired said he was happy to get a man fired over his speech. Yes, there’s people on the right who believe that mere offensive speech constitutes bullying, the same side that rallied in support of Jordan Peterson for refusing to say whatever pronoun Canada asks him to, and almost no one was calling this out. And it’s all a product of the culture war which we’ve allowed ourselves to think is another other than bullshit that distracts us from the real problem.

What real problem you might ask? The short answer, frankly, is capitalism. The long answer is multi-faceted, but I’ll do my best to explain. For starters, you may remember a series of events concerning social media and censorship, in particular pertaining to YouTube. I have covered YouTube’s path towards authoritarianism and retardation many times, including that time Jeremy Crow found himself the subject of demonetization. Also, as it turns out, it’s not just edgy right-wingers who get subject to the limited state feature. Even communists are subject to it. Even liberal SJW apologists are subject to it. I’ve even seen channels like ReviewTechUSA get a video put into limited state at one point. Once you discover this, the idea that Google is solely attacking right-wingers or Nazis falls apart, and what you instead see is that this is probably the product of the particular algorithm that YouTube has. But, that’s not my main point. My main point is that companies like Google and YouTube are simply doing this in order to secure advertisers on their platform, and you can also see Twitter banning far-righters and collecting data on what website you go on in order to curtail “hate speech” as simply a reaction to their decline in the market and the perception that it this is caused by an online harassment problem. Thus, the erosion of freedom of speech on social media is directly caused by capitalistic incentives via the profit motive: or, in other words, you. Not to mention, we all know that many of these companies also sell your data and information and have been doing so for years for much the same reason: to make a profit off of it. This on its own should be a refutation of the axiom of “the freer the markets, the freer the people”. But more than this, it is a manifestation of the capitalist, even liberal, idea that freedom is all tied in with property, meaning that, if you are a subject of that property, the property owner takes away your freedom of speech. See, many critics of the actions of these social media websites I’ve seen will question the private company argument because they rightly think that you should not be suppressed arbitrarily by these companies, but in every other instance they will ultimately use the propertarian lens to support the very same political and economic system that has made these problems manifest to begin with.

Then you have the looming automation crisis, which I have discussed before. I have always been worried about the rise of automation and artificial intelligence, and the effects that it will have on humanity and society at large. What I never realized though is that this is another reason to reject capitalism. Think about it: you’re going to see millions of people economically displaced, they’re not going to be able to get employment because they’re not needed anymore for the most part, and universal basic income will not help because you’re going to run out of money to support it because no one is going to get any income because they can’t get jobs. And if that’s not enough, . Not to mention, the only reason we have things like planned obsolesence is because companies like Apple know that they can make an extra buck by shortening the life span of their products, forcing customers to buy more. Oh, and if political correctness and feminism bother you, take a look at the kind of people who sponsor it. Then there’s mass immigration in regards to the current migration crisis, which, as it turns out, can be explained largely by decades of American destabilization of the Middle East coupled with the capitalistic interest in cheap labour. Hell, what I recognize as globalism is nothing more than the product neoliberal capitalism inevitably transgresses the borders of the nation state because, as a system built on profit, growth and consumption, it must access new markets by any means or it will stagnate and die. Not to mention, pretty much everyone who can accurately be pointed to as one of the globalists is also a died in the wool member of the capitalist class (just look at the American Deep State, the European Union, or the IMF and you’ll see what I mean). Then there is simply the fact the consumer culture that I have long hated can easily be traced to the mass industrialization of culture that the capitalist mode of production has generated.

I mean there are so many capitalistic interests underpinning what I’ve been opposing the entire time that I’m starting to think the only reason the right is so autistic about Marxism is because they don’t want to oppose capitalism despite it being the logical conclusion of some of their grievances. Only by replacing the current economic system with a system that isn’t based off of profit and consumption, and is instead based on putting economic power into the hands of the people rather than corporations or the state, are you going to get rid of the incentives that drive all of the woes I speak of, but I guess they’re not smart enough to realize it. And we’re going to need to do it pretty soon before either automation robs us all of jobs or we run out of the resources needed to make even tiny little computer chips within a century. Not to mention, when the next economic crisis arrives, which it is predicted to do so within relatively short order, people are going radicalize in response to the material conditions and turn away from liberal capitalism. At that point, the two options most people will pick will be either socialism or fascism. And I really, really, really would not like to see the return of fascism. I’ve even discussed this before when writing about Edward Bernays, just from the libertarian and anti-socialist perspective that I once had. Mark my words, we have seen fascism arise , it will happen again.

In many ways I am starting to think that I was right-wing for the following reasons: (1) I sympathized with libertarians on wedge issues, (2) I simply reacted to the left at the time, and without any understanding of the actual ideas of the left I could not criticize the actions of people like Antifa from a left position, and (3) because at the time I began to think that supporting some form of national populism was the logical means of rebelling against the establishment. But if I think about it, the position I was in really ultimately supports the system more than it opposes it. The only area in which that isn’t the case is in the culture war and the whole globalism thing, and even then, unless it goes outside of and opposes capitalism in meaningful way, all it’s going to do is support the status quo that generates my woes to begin with. All I did was dislike the way some of the left was acting, and then I found myself in a position that really isn’t going to do much in the long run, and is based simply on reaction. It was, I guess for all intents and purposes, a reactionary phase.

That, in one long rant, encompasses my political journey, and the realizations that I have made along the way. I hope it wasn’t too boring. I won’t be deleting any of my posts from my prior political phase simply because there is no point in trying to scrub that out of my blog’s history.

Yes. Lately I am of the impression that something is going on in the world and there’s a faint connection between the way certain events are playing out politically, socially and culturally.

As the migrant crisis rolled on through the current year, and even as social cohesion is slowly breaking down in Europe, a narrative is being pushed about how this is all still a positive thing that we should be celebrating, and the German government is working to silence any criticism of the country’s immigration policy and the effects that mass immigration is having on their communities. Not to mention, the German government and the European Union have been collaborating with Facebook and Twitter in order to censor what they deem as “hate speech” – which is no doubt going to include expressing a dissenting opinion on the migrant crisis. There have been reports of right-wing groups being banned from Facebook for talking about what they feel is the Islamization of their communities, as well as conservative commentators who would likely have a problem with an establishment that is putting multiculturalism above all else.

In the UK, it has been that police have been tracking tweets on Twitter and it is suspected that they can arrest people simply for offending someone on Twitter. People have actually been arrested for sending the wrong tweet or publishing the wrong video on YouTube in some cases. Not to mention, anti-Islamic tweets are being tracked by Demos and being treated as Islamophobic, and given the actions of the British police it’s not such a wild stretch to suspect that the government might start using a narrative of protecting the “real victims” as a means of justifying widespread surveillance and prosecution of thought-crime.

In America, as the political battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump continues and the culture war rages on, Hillary herself has proven herself willing enough to declare Breitbart, one of the largest voices of opposition to her campaign, as a site that has no right to exist. She has outright declared her contempt for a large selection of the electorate by referring to them as “deplorables” and declared war on the so-called “alt-right”, which to her basically means a vast conspiracy of Trump supporters, Nigel Farage and his supporters and InfoWars and their supporters lead by Vladmir fucking Putin! And when the DNC leaks came out, she and her team blamed a Russian conspiracy rather than face up to the fact that they are unscrupulous and corrupt.

The mainstream (read: controlled) media seems to mostly be on the side of Clinton, or at the very least firmly against Trump (but let’s face it, I’m sure for many Americans at this point there is almost no difference). And guess who has ties to the US mainstream media? Recently, chat logs from Crash Override Network have been leaked. Crash Override Network is a group started by Zoe Quinn (yes, that Zoe Quinn) supposedly set to fight online harassment, but in truth are nothing but a bunch of schemers conspiring against the people involved in the consumer revolt known as GamerGate. And it was also revealed that the people in CON claimed to have friends in mainstream media outlets like CNN, PBS, and Wall Street Journal, as well as the Canadian CBC, awaiting reports from those outlets, which suggests that they might actually be in collusion in order to get their side of the story. These people have also been in support of a gaming media that has pushed for gaming culture to be aligned with progressivism and the propping of abstract art over actual gaming, and declared its own audience to be dead for opposing it, and they have been, and still are, prepared to lie in order to push a narrative. And let’s not forget Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn petitioning the United Nations (which is now almost a joke anyways) to push for greater control of the Internet in order to allow social media companies to, quite simply, ban people from telling them that they are liars and that they suck. Facebook and Twitter have already had a reputation of suppressing conservative and sometimes libertarian thinkers for pushing against the status quo, and in Twitter’s case people like Milo Yiannpoulos get banned for something his fans apparently did while ISIS members and pedophiles get off scot-free. All Sarkeesian and Quinn want to do is, like the EU and Germany, expand the power of the state and big social media (as I call it) to censor people.

Not to mention, Barack Obama is basically giving away America’s control of the Internet, allowing foreign powers to control it instead. What this means is essentially that foreign countries, countries that have less respect for freedom of speech than America, can disable websites and censor speech without the protections of US law, which are part of the reason that the Internet has managed to stay free and open.

The Internet is the single biggest liberator of information known to Man. Think about it: before the age of the Internet, it was much easier for the media and whoever was in power to control the information you have access to, meaning it was far easier for people to have some control over what you think. With the rise of the Internet this changed dramatically. You still have media outlets presenting a controlled version of reality, and you still have people believing it, but it is way easier to access a vast diversity of ideas and worldviews today and by simply performing a search on Google or something you can find thousands or millions of results and a lot of them don’t dance to the same tune. Many ideas and ways of thinking that might never have been known to the common public 30 years ago can now be discovered easily on the Internet. People in the government, the media and in large corporations seem to be aware that those who control information can control what people think, and he (or she) who controls the Internet will control the world and the minds of its population. That’s why you have people who are trying to impose greater restrictions on speech and expression on the Internet under the guise of saintly intentions such as “protecting victims” from mostly imagined and/or poorly defined threats.

All of this leads me to wonder: what if InfoWars (and I must stress that I am no fan of InfoWars or Alex Jones) is right and there really is a war on for your mind? Perhaps it likely isn’t what the people at InfoWars think it is, and the Illuminati most likely isn’t going to be involved, but it’s hard for me not to suspect that there’s something much bigger going on. Or, for that matter, that something big might be coming. And you don’t even need to delve into conspiracy theory in order to suspect that this is the case. I think there very well could be a larger agenda of control at work, one playing out right before our eyes no less! We may, within our lifetimes, see Western society become so controlled that the freedoms we hold so dearly in the West will become unrecognizable. And I don’t believe that everyone will take that lightly.

The fight to preserve the values of liberal democracy won’t be fought in the battlefield where the armed forces of the Western world are currently engaged in conflict or will be in the future, nor will it be fought on our behalf by the state. It can only be fought by all of us as individuals on the battleground of ideas, where all of the other culture wars fought in our societies are fought. For make no mistake, this is in truth a culture war.

It should not have escaped your notice that the illiberal (nay, anti-liberal) identity politics championed by the likes of feminists and Black Lives Matter is not just endorsed by celebrities and the mainstream media, but in America’s case it is also being endorsed by the current president Barack Obama and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. That to me suggests that politics and the state is dancing to the tune of prevailing identitarian progressivism and the division that it engenders, perhaps because the people who support it are the loudest voices. But the prevalence of progressive identity politics is not the only problem. The values of Western liberal democracy are being eroded culturally by other factors as well. And again, not so much by the state but by the people, even though they stand to benefit from these values prevailing in our society.

For instance, freedom of expression. We have witnessed several instances in the Western world where artistic media and advertisement can be censored by the whim of public outrage, even if that outrage is in the minority like in the case of the Protein World ad saga. In Australia Grand Theft Auto V got banned at Target Australia by a large number of people who have never played any Grand Theft Auto game but presume to know what it is about. When DC Comics released a Batgirl comic depicting the Joker holding, tons of people. When video game companies like Lionhead Studios and Obsidian Entertainment have intended joke content in their games (like the a depiction of a woman with large breasts in Fable III for National Cleavage Day, and a poem about a Don Juan type character named Firedorn Lightbringer within Pillars of Eternity) that happens to offend someone on Twitter, the people on Twitter take it upon themselves to shame them into changing or removing that content and eventually the companies capitulate and apologize for content that they made as a joke. And don’t criticize social justice warriors Stephanie Guthrie for shaming the creator of an Anita Sarkeesian face-punch game, or you could be the center of a witch-hunt and be accused of harassment simply for disagreeing with her. On YouTube, you can actually have a video removed for the ever-vague notions of hate speech. And more recently, after everyone’s favorite gay super-villain Milo Yiannopoulos published a scathing review of the new Ghostbusters movie on Breitbart, actress Leslie Jones reported Milo and now there’s a hashtag campaign aimed at getting Twitter to ban Milo Yiannopoulos. And it worked: Twitter has recently suspended Milo Yiannopoulos, and I can only assume he has been getting the blame for the ire directed at Leslie Jones.

It seems to be lost on the people advocating that Milo be suspended that while he can be censored for a scathing movie review, and perhaps blamed for the actions of those who might have harassed Leslie Jones, there are examples of people who threaten others with violence publicly, and yet they have not been banned. Indeed, I can’t say if any of the people shouting for killing police officers in the wake of Alton Sterling have been banned yet either. It is thus entirely obvious that people with the wrong opinion in the eyes of the Twitterati are punished with censorship and accused of harassing other people, while people who actually call for violence against individuals remain active on Twitter.

The power of social pressure is such that a man can land a spacecraft on a comet, but he can be reduced to tears because of constant pressure and shaming by a large number of feminists for nothing more than the fact that he was wearing a T-shirt with a lot of scantily-clad women on it. If a public figure makes so much as an innocuous joke that offends the wrong people, they’re harassed and shamed by people with puritan mindsets and too much time on their hands. Like Tim Hunt’s joke about female scientists, or Richard Dawkin’s sharing of a video by SyeTenAtheist on Sargon of Akkad’s channel. In the former case, Tim Hunt lost his job. In the latter, Richard Dawkins may well have suffered a stroke brought on by the stress of being constantly harassed by SJWs shaming him for sharing the video. And sometimes it happened to private individuals who weren’t so famous before, like Justine Sacco, a senior director of corporate communications at IAC who posted a sarcastic tweet about AIDS during a trip to South Africa and found herself publicly shamed and trending on Twitter as a result.

It’s also at a point where the phenomenon of “trial by Twitter” is fairly well-documented. That’s right, online social pressure is even valued above the rule of law – one of the cornerstones of any liberal democracy worth its salt. Like in the case of Kesha’s attempted to sue produce Dr. Luke, accusing him of sexually, physically and emotionally abusing her. She was denied a temporary injunction, and tons of people sided with her and condemned Dr. Luke simply because Kesha broke into tears over being denied that injunction, and despite a lack of hard evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of Dr. Luke. There’s also the case of Afrika Bambaataa, who was accused of sexual assault by several individuals who claim he abused them in the 1980’s when they were underaged, including a Democrat activist who released a video accusing him of rape (apparently for the purpose of “emotional healing”, seemingly as a substitute for calling the police). There has been no criminal conviction against Bambaataa, at least not as of yet, and unfortunately the case can’t be tried in court and police investigations are apparently not possible due to New York’s statutes of limitation, but despite this there have been calls for Cornell University to discard their collection of records released by Bambaataa and he has been effectively disavowed by the public and Zulu Nation. When Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian radio personality accused of rape, was acquitted, the Twitterati were outraged that people chose not to automatically believe the plaintiff, and there were even voices suggesting that the premise of the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, along with the adversarial legal system, be abandoned entirely.

To me, it seems that the power of social pressure magnified by social media has not been lost on people living in the age of social media. Indeed, I think it seems like social media either has too much power or gives too many people too much power to coerce private entities and individuals or just shame them.

Another force that working against the values of liberal democracy is cultural relativism – the idea that there are no greater or lesser cultures, just different ones that are all equal. The problem with this prevailing is obvious. Every time, nowadays, when there is a serious terrorist attack committed by someone shown to identify with radical Islam, there are too many people unwilling to address the culture within which they are raised or raise themselves. In fact, we too often have a media and politicians who want to turn us away from the motives of the culprit. Not to mention, in the UK, there are actually sharia courts in operation and it is feared that they basically operate as sub-legal or parallel legal courts, similar to how the Khap Panchayats operate in India. And I’m sure the phenomenon of Salafist Muslims taking to the street to agitate for the supremacy of sharia law is well-known. It seems evident to me that the idea of individuals from different cultural backgrounds existing under a common banner is fading in the West, and we are actively allowing this by not questioning any aspect of it whatsoever. And it is worse in Europe, where it is starting to feel like there’s going to be a new Islam-inspired terrorist attack that takes the lives of tens of innocents every month or so. And every time it happens, people are discouraged from talking about a radical Islamic culture that has been fostering for a long time and currently inspires future terrorists whilst going unchallenged by a society that seems uninterested or unable to tell them . And all because of the bizarre conflation of the Islamic religion with the Arab ethnicity or race, despite the obvious fact that being a Muslim and being an Arab are not the same thing – one is a religion you can be raised in or choose to be part of, the other is a race, something you are born as.

I believe that all of the following needs to happen in the West if the values of liberal democracy are to be saved.

Private companies must exert their right to refuse to censor themselves in order to suit the whims of social justice warriors.

Individuals must not allow themselves to be silenced by the same social justice warriors.

Social media companies need to show that freedom of speech and expression is a right guaranteed to all.

Private media companies should refuse to cave to social pressure and refuse to fire people for saying the wrong thing.

We must delegitimatize the phenomenon of “trial by Twitter” in which people are “tried” by court of public opinion via social media, and instead trumpet the rule of law.

We must reject cultural relativism, and embrace the values of secular liberal democracy as a common banner under which we all live under instead of encouraging self-segregation.

We must challenge bad ideas in forum of public debate and the media, especially the bad ideas that have inspired an increasing number of terrorist attacks.

People who are easily triggered need to just block people who harass them instead of further stoking the flames. Better yet, get off social media for a little bit or turn off the phone.

If none of these things happen, then I predict that the values of liberal democracy will be eroded, and Western civilization will truly decline.

Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World (1886) by Edward Moran.